A History of the Episcopal Church (Third Revised Edition). Robert W. Prichard

the appropriate way to accept this covenant agreement. Episcopacy was, therefore, a necessary element of the covenant. This episcopal version of covenant theology would prove extremely useful to generations of Church of England clergy.

The society’s first parishioners in New England and the middle colonies were emigrants from England who petitioned the SPG for help in the formation of Church of England congregations. There were early Dutch members as well: Dutch settlers in western Massachusetts, who felt unwelcome in the Congregational Church, and Dutch-speaking graduates of the SPG charity school in New York City who had received instruction both in the English language and the Book of Common Prayer from schoolmasters William and Thomas Huddleston.³⁶

Initially, many of these church members were among the poorer and less-privileged inhabitants of the colonies. Eighteenth-century Connecticut tax rolls indicated, for example, that two-thirds of the members of Church of England’s congregations in that colony were residents of rural areas and that the percentage of poor was higher than among Congregationalists.³⁷

In 1722, SPG missionaries made their first inroads into the New England upper class. In September of that year, seven faculty members and recent graduates of Yale College signed a statement for the Yale Board of Trustees indicating “doubt [of] the validity” or persuasion of the “invalidity” of nonepiscopal ordination. The seven, all of whom were Congregational clergy, had met in an informal book club to which they had also invited George Pigot, the SPG missionary in Stratford. Pigot called their doubts on the question of episcopacy “a glorious revolution of the ecclesiastics of this country.”³⁸

      Four of the seven—Yale rector Timothy Cutler (1683 or 1684– 1765), tutor Daniel Brown (1698–1723), former tutor Samuel Johnson (1696–1772), and recent graduate James Wetmore (d. 1760)—sailed to England for reordination. Brown died of small pox while in England, but the remaining three were ordained and assigned to American parishes by the SPG: Cutler to Christ (Old North) Church in Boston (1723–64), Wetmore to Rye, New York (1726–60), and Johnson to Stratford, Connecticut, which was left vacant when Pigot moved on to Rhode Island. The contributions of the three men were not limited to the individual parishes they served, however. Native-born and well educated, they provided needed leadership for the small Church of England in New England and New York. Samuel Johnson, for example, served for nine years (1754–63) as the first president of King’s (Columbia) College in New York.

The connection of Yale with the Church of England would not end with the 1722 converts. Yale would go on to provide a total of fifty students and graduates for the ministry of the colonial Church of England, the largest number of any American institution.³⁹

      The Congregational Church was the established church in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. As was the case with the Church of England in the South, the Congregational Church in New England was tax supported. As the Church of England made steady gains, however, the New England legislatures made some concessions. In 1727, Connecticut exempted all Church of England parishioners living within five miles of their church buildings from paying state church taxes. Massachusetts passed similar legislation in 1735.

      Thomas Bray’s SPG (changed in 1965 to the USPG—“the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel”—as a result of a merger with the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, a name that was shortened in 2012 to the “United Society” or “Us.”) and SPCK continues their activities in the twenty-first century.

Fig. 7 Timothy Cutler

Fig. 8 Samuel Johnson

Ministry to African Americans

In 1724 Thomas Bray secured a charter for a third missionary society, known as Dr. Bray’s Associates.⁴⁰ The organization’s efforts were directed to the evangelization and education of black Americans. It supported schools for blacks in Philadelphia (1758–75?); New York (1760–74); Williamsburg (1760–74) and Fredericksburg (1765–1770), Virginia; and Newport, Rhode Island (1762–1775?). While male clergy served as superintendents of these schools, most of the actual instruction was given by white school mistresses, such as Anne Wager of Williamsburg. After the American Revolution halted all ongoing projects, the society’s managers devoted its assets to charitable projects within England.⁴¹ As the existence of the Dr. Bray’s Associates suggested, some colonial members of the Church of England shared the concern for evangelization of African Americans that critics of slavery, such as Morgan Godwyn, had voiced in the seventeenth century. They were a distinct minority in the first two decades of the eighteenth century, with many slave owners actively resisting directions from England about providing Christian instruction of enslaved persons. They were most opposed to evangelization of the African-born. The General Assembly in Virginia ignored an act of the English Parliament and a declaration of the acting colonial governor (1713) calling for catechizing enslaved persons.⁴² Attitudes began to change in the 1720s. In the case of Virginia the year 1727 was an apparent tipping point. The accumulated effect of regular calls for action by the English (Bishop of London Edmund Gibson’s inquiry about baptism of enslaved people, 1724; Gibson’s two letters on baptism, 1727; instruction to Governor William Gooch by the Board of Trade on the importance of baptism, 1727; etc.), the growing percentage of enslaved people who had born in the colonies rather than Africa, and a careful political calculation that perhaps Christian slaves might be more easily managed than followers of African traditional religions began to make a difference. The Virginia General Assembly issued its own call for baptism in 1730, and parish clergy began to meet with increasing success in their efforts to convince slave owners to allow their baptism of the enslaved. As the number of baptisms rose, so did church attendance with at least one Virginia parish constructing its first designated pew for enslaved persons in 1732.⁴³ Colonial courts in Virginia and Maryland even extended the curious “right of clergy” to African Americans in the 1720s. Originally a medieval privilege of clergy to be tried in church rather than secular courts, the “right of clergy” had morphed into a plea to be spared the death penalty and given some lesser punishment such as branding that could be made by anyone who could demonstrate the ability to read a portion of the Bible (usually Psalm 51).⁴⁴

For their own part, enslaved people were not simply passive recipients of instruction in the Christian faith. Many sought baptism for themselves and their children, recognizing “Christianity’s implicit message of freedom.” Long after the passage of colonial laws denying any connection between servitude and baptism, enslaved people continued to hold out hope. Slaves in Virginia, for example, revolted in 1730 as a result of a rumor that colonial authorities had suppressed an opinion from English legal authorities that all enslaved Christians should be set free.⁴⁵

Clergy who were most deeply involved in the effort to evangelize and teach enslaved people were often those most critical of the institution. Anthony Galvin became a slave owner when he came to Henrico parish in Virginia in 1735. Three years later